Study Finds Women Less Likely To Survive Heart Attack If Treated By Male Doctor

A Harvard researcher finds women are less likely to survive a heart attack if their doctor is a man.

In a new article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, all heart attack patients fared better when treated by doctors of their same gender.

But Harvard Business professor Laura Huang says women with male doctors had the highest death rates of any group studied.

"The job of the physician is to be saving lives regardless of who the patient is, but yet there's a real difference in who lives and who dies, which is mirroring the sort of bias and discrimination that we're seeing in other contexts," she told WBUR.

Huang and her colleagues found women, if treated by a man, are 12 percent more likely to die from a heart attack than the average patient.